"Hey, we want our allies in the Democratic party to win in spite of coming off of an unpopular presidency, so let's hobble the Republicans by promoting the absolute worst one we can find. That will surely never come back to bite us in the rump!"

Voting in the primary of the other party is definitely prone to chicanery, sure.

My main preference for approval is that it opens up more options. I don't think it'll really solve any sort of political mayhem, not entirely. That's the nature of people. However, sheer numbers means it's harder to screw with everything. More viable candidates ought to help in the long run. That's true within parties as well.

Which system is this? It looks like you're dissing approval voting, but the example looks more like ranked choice. In approval voting, C (the universally hated candidate) would only have one vote. A and B would split the rest of the votes, including (if it's there) the approval from the C voter, and that is the desired outcome in this case.

Ranked choice has variants in which you must rank all choices. Most voters don't know the bottom candidates well enough to rank them, and probably don't need to.

Tyndmyr wrote:If you vote for preferences other than your real ones, and as a result, you get what you voted for, you probably employed poor strategy.

Only en masse, and only if it was possible to elect your real preference in the first place. Individually, you are still at the mercy of the rest of the population.

Jose

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"Hey, we want our allies in the Democratic party to win in spite of coming off of an unpopular presidency, so let's hobble the Republicans by promoting the absolute worst one we can find. That will surely never come back to bite us in the rump!"

I tried to find another source but seems like the daily mail has the lead on this one for now. Article details an upcoming book written by a former stenographer who produced transcripts for Obama's press pool.

Lots of neat - unfiltered - insights into the life of a press pool worker.

I haven't searched for a source for this yet, but I do seem to recall there being some allegations on the republican side in 2016 that there were some democrats crossing the aisle in primary season to vote for/against trump so that it would be an easy win for Hillary in the general election (or conversely to stop trump).

Ok. I didn't want to post this without at least doing some looking. Most of what I found was garbage posts on facebook or silly ask the expert type websites where people were asking if that was a viable strategy.

CNBC did a little bit on why trump was doing better in open primaries than in closed caucuses. After reading the article it reminded me of why I thought there were these allegations. It was because Cruz was complaining about how he was doing so well in closed primaries and caucuses but then in open primaries Trump and Kasich seemed to do better. He postulated that Democrats were crossing over to stop ted cruz and spoil the primary.

In hindsight, I think the conclusion CNBC came up with, that Trump was winning over blue collar registered democrats in the rust belt is far more likely. A lot of people failed to see this coming. I think if Hillary's team had identified this possibility earlier they may have focused more on those one time reliable blue counties - turned red in 2016 parts of ohio / wisconsin and pennsylvania.

I bet there is a fivethirtyeight post about this but I wasn't able to find one quickly.

I mean, I'll cop to registering as a Republican to vote against Trump in the primaries, but that wasn't out of pro-Hillary feeling, and I certainly didn't vote for her in the general. Being anti-Trump and being pro-Clinton are correlated, but they're definitely not identical.

I do think there was a great deal of scrambling for convenient answers to explain Trump that didn't require any actual change. Both on the Republican side for the primary, and on the Democrat side later.

Without trying to delve too much more into the 2016 election (I don't want to take over this thread, there are other threads for such discussion)....

I think there was a lot of "soul searching" going on at that time to help try and explain away the reasons for Trump's rise. I think if we reflect back now we can see what was happening. That's the beauty of hindsight.

There were a lot of idiots in the media who wanted to find something rational about the rise of Trump, rather than face the gritty reality that they are responsible for allowing right-wing propaganda to create an environment where a large chunk of the country will believe any conspiracy theory about Democrats, while brushing off any criminal wrongdoing by Republicans as attacks by the so-called liberal media.

In practice, they gave Trump an absolute crapton of media coverage. Oh, sure, they might not have liked him much, but the ol' saw about there being no such thing as bad publicity is not entirely wrong. I do think the sheer quantity of media coverage helped him rise. Likewise, the media's tendency to focus on awfulness has definitely caused a bunch of issues, some of which are related to Trump's rise. I mean, they use rules like "if it bleeds, it leads", and then act surprised that people overestimate the prevalence of crime and look for a solution.

Yeah, the democrats could have run a better candidate, but the media is definitely up to their ears in responsibility as well.

Well, one thing we didn't know until now was that whoever did the graphic for Attachment H was either a different person than the one who did the graphic for Attachment G or used a different keyboard for each attachment. Attachment H has a distinct lack of the lowercase letter L.

If you like Call of Cthulhu and modern government conspiracy, check out my Delta Green thread.Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments.

I had to go back and look. There must have been a scaling issue with that graphic because the letter " I " is also missing in DIRECTION in the legend box.

I am slightly curious what is contained in the classified attachment.

I am not so surprised that there was really no new information gained in this report. It seems as though a report that, in small part, criticized leaks, was in itself, already leaked.. Thought I will allow that many of this information had been released to congress. And it's pretty clear congress can't keep a secret.

That is awesome. It's too bad olivine is so prevalent in nature (especially so on the Hawaiian islands.. for obvious reasons). Would still be really cool to wake up and have a bunch of crystals all over your yard. Though also slightly terrifying to realize how close you are to the danger.

Makes me also wonder about alien landscapes and how another world might experience these types of events. Or those articles that talk about planets that rain diamond etc.

We're in the traffic-chopper over the XKCD boards where there's been a thread-derailment. A Liquified Godwin spill has evacuated threads in a fourty-post radius of the accident, Lolcats and TVTropes have broken free of their containers. It is believed that the Point has perished.